Nel dibattito teorico, la metafora della mappa è stata spesso usata per esplorare il ruolo della nozione di verità nel rapporto tra linguaggio, rappresentazioni, realtà. Le mappe sono sempre prospettiche, legate a interessi (cognitivi e non cognitivi) di chi le elabora; come ha osservato Michael Lynch, "il mondo non si mappa da sé". Per quanto diverse esse siano, assumiamo in genere che le pratiche descrittive possano aspirare a qualche forma di verità e corrispondere al modo in cui le cose stanno. (...) Non è facile spiegare in che cosa consista questa "corrispondenza", anche perché è controversa la possibilità di distinguere quanto, nelle rappresentazioni linguistiche, dipende dal mondo e quanto dai nostri schemi concettuali. Il ruolo del concetto di verità diventa sempre più complesso, se si prendono sul serio le differenze nei modi di accedervi e nei campi oggettivi di riferimento; ciò dà spazio ad uno spettro molto ampio di posizioni filosofiche, fra loro contrastanti, che rimescolano le carte delle tradizionali controversie tra realisti, antirealisti, relativisti. I saggi compresi in questo volume costituiscono un momento di incontro volto ad afferrare e discutere la fisionomia di queste controversie. (shrink)

From the Proceedings of the meeting Mind and Life XII, 'What is matter, what is life?', held in Dharamsala, India, in 2002, in the presence of His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama.

L’articolo affronta il problema delle interazioni fra cittadini romani e indigeni nel territorio di Bergomum, municipium della regio xi - Transpadana, attraverso l’esame delle formule onomastiche riscontrabili in alcune iscrizioni. In particolare, l’analisi della documentazione epigrafica agirà su un doppio binario, prendendo in considerazione sia formule di onomastica idionimica – tipicamente indigene e presenti anche dopo la concessione della cittadinanza romana alla Transpadana alla metà del I secolo a.C. – sia formule fedeli al modello romano dei tria nomina, che testimoniano (...) un’ascendenza celtica e una certa persistenza di abitudini locali. Le prove fornite dall’onomastica, dunque, saranno utili ad indagare come gli abitanti “indigeni” di Bergomum abbiano affrontato la romanizzazione del loro territorio e attraverso quali meccanismi vennero integrati nella struttura sociale romana; ciò anche attraverso il confronto con realtà circonvicine, prima fra tutte la Colonia Civica Augusta Brixia. (shrink)

The author makes an innovative reading of human rights based on the dimensions of space, time and memory, as constituent dimensions of being. To do this, he explains new coordinates in the post-human era of the globalized world.: the profound crisis of political space revealed in the State, and its..

Focusing on the relationship between two important scientists in the development of ecological thought during the first half of the twentieth century, this paper argues that Yale limnologist G. E. Hutchinson's adoption of the biogeochemical approach in the late 1930s builds on the 1920s work of the Russian scientist V. I. Vernadsky. An analysis of Hutchinson’s scientific publications shows that he first referred to Vernadsky in 1940, on two different occasions. This article analyzes the dynamics of Hutchinson’s formulation of the (...) biogeochemical approach, providing historical context and linking its early application to the existing limnological tradition. (shrink)

1. Critica de capire e altri scritti. 2. Scritti kantiani. 3. L'analitica trascendentale. 4. Il problema della scienza e il giudizio storico.

Luigi Giussani, a high school religion teacher throughout the 1950s and 1960s, grounded his teachings in the vast body of experience to be found in Christianity's two-thousand-year history. He told his students, “I'm not here to make you adopt the ideas I will give you as your own, but to teach you a method for judging the things I will say.” Throughout his life, education was one of Giussani's primary intellectual interests. He believed that effective education required an adequate (...) background in the Christian tradition, presented within a lived experience that underscored the capacity of the faith to answer universal questions. What he proposed was a process that allowed one to sift through tradition, critically examining it and comparing it against the ultimate criteria for judgment: the desires of the heart. In Giussani's view, the primary concern was to “educate the human heart as God made it.” In The Risk of Education he states that fear leads students to associate this process of criticism with negativity or doubt. Yet, without an education in criticism, students cannot develop conviction. At a time when young people are abandoning the church and questioning the value of faith, Giussani's method of judging and verifying Christianity as an experience seems a necessary intervention. In The Risk of Education he argues that, ultimately, education and the Christian message reveal themselves through human freedom. (shrink)

A fronte di rapide trasformazioni geo-politiche globali, il tema dei diritti fondamentali - quale sia la loro struttura, quali debbano considerarsi tali, in qual modo li si possa garantire, quale il rapporto con la cittadinanza e la democrazia - acquista sempre maggiore rilevanza nella discussione pubblica. Luigi Ferraioli propone su questi problemi un'originale e innovativa riflessione, suscitando un dibattito in cui si coniugano rigore scientifico e passione civile.

In the following paper, the author will try to test the meaning of the transcendental approach in respect of the inner changes implied by the idea of quantum gravity. He will firstly describe the basic methodological Kant’s aim, viz. the grounding of a meta-science of physics as the a priori corpus of physical knowledge. After that, he will take into account the problematic physical and philosophical relationship between the theory of relativity and the quantum mechanics; in showing how the elementary (...) ontological and epistemological assumptions of experience result to be changed within them, he will also show the further modifications occurred in the development of the loop quantum gravity. He will particularly focus on the tough problem of the relationship space-matter, in order to settle the decisive question about the possibility of keeping a transcendental approach in the light of quantum gravity. He will positively answer by recalling Cassirer’s theory of the invariants of experience, although he will also add some problematic issues arising from the new physical context. (shrink)

This book examines recent forms of secularisation to demonstrate that we are now witnessing a "fourth secularisation": the autonomy of lifestyles. After introducing two initial secularising movements, from mythosto Logosand from Logosto Christianity, the book sets out how from Max Weber onwards a third movement emerged that practised the autonomy of science. More recently, daily life radicalises Weber's secularisation and its scope has spread out to include autonomy of individual practices, which has given rise to this fourth iteration. The book (...) outlines these first three forms of secularisation and then analyses the fourth secularisation in depth, identifying its three main dimensions: the de-institutionalisation of the religious lifestyle; the individualisation of faith; and the development of new social forms in the religious field. These areas of religious practice are shown to be multiplying partly as a result of the general aestheticization of society. Individuals, therefore, aspire to personal styles of life with regard to beliefs and the choice of their own religious practices. This book will be of great use to scholars of religious studies, secularisation and the sociology of religion. own to be multiplying partly as a result of the general aestheticization of society. Individuals, therefore, aspire to personal styles of life with regard to beliefs and the choice of their own religious practices. This book will be of great use to scholars of religious studies, secularisation and the sociology of religion. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that 1) Kant’s power of judgment is constitutively always reflecting, as its lawful employments involve a preliminary self-reference of the faculties the power of judgment itself is required to connect and let them match with each other. Accordingly, I claim that 2) the principle of purposiveness is the principle of the power of judgment as such, and not just of an allegedly self-standing reflecting branch of this faculty. I criticize the view that Kant draws a (...) dichotomy between reflecting and determining judgments and argue that 3) Kant’s point in the third Critique is to rule out the amphiboly between the reflecting and the determining employment of the principle of purposiveness. The power of judgment is, as such, always reflecting: while in the case of cognition it also works in a determining way, in the case of both aesthetics and teleology it is only reflecting, i.e., self-purposive – as it sets its function as its own end. (shrink)

In the course of 1901, V. Crémieu published the results of some experiments carried out to test the magnetic effects of electric convection currents. According to Crémieu, his experiments had proved that convection currents had no magnetic effects and consequently they were not equivalent to conduction currents, that is they were not ‘real’ electric currents. These negative results conflicted with those of well-known experiments carried out by other researchers, in particular with Rowland's experiments, and with Maxwell's, Hertz's and Lorentz's theories, (...) which was more shocking. The publication of Crémieu's experiments raised a controversy which involved directly or indirectly some leading French and British physicists, and led Rowland together with his student Pender to re-perform his experiments. Pender's results confirmed those preiously obtained by Rowland, in striking conflict with those of Crémieu. The importance of Crémieu's experiments was stressed by Poincaré in some of his publications, where he analysed and criticized various aspects of the question. However, he was involved more deeply: his correspondence with Crémieu shows that many of the experiments performed by Crémieu were conceived by Poincaré and carried out with his guidance. To put an end to the controversy, Poincaré obtained Kelvin's support to organize Crémieu's and Pender's joint experiments. The results of these experiments showed that the conflicting results obtained previously were due to an ‘anomalous’ behaviour of the dielectrics used by Crémieu in his apparatus. (shrink)

Una proposta di lettura ";trascendentalista"; del ";De ente"; di Tommaso d'Aquino. Il venir meno dei presupposti per fondare un rapporto forte tra discorso e realtà.

Kant devotes to the problem of Cartesian skepticism a constant attention throughout his philosophical career. His first attempt to refute the skeptic goes back to the 1755 Nova Delucidatio, while other arguments, both in the pre-critical and in the critical period, follow one another in a rather erratic effort to remove the “scandal” of philosophy, that is, our inability to prove the existence of the external world beyond doubt. This on-going struggle against the skeptic does not end with the 1787 (...) Second Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason wherein Kant presents his famous Refutation of Idealism. In a series of Reflexionen dating from the late 1780s to the early 1790 and named by Adickes “Reflexionen zum Idealismus,” Kant comes back to the problem that had captured his attention since 1755. (shrink)

Scholarly work on the relationship between time and politics has a long history. Polybius and Machiavelli, to name just two important writers, have given a lot attention to the way in which politic...